Blekko

I typically don't post about vendor experiences I have at Computers in Libraries.  They generally aren't interesting or notable to post in a public forum, even if the vendor has something that I find personally of interest.  However an unusual vendor at this year's conference was not selling a subscription library product at all and was promoting a free website, and it was quite intriguing, so I'm posting on it.

The company in this case is Blekko, a search engine company in competition with Google (the hosting company for this blog) and Bing.  I don't think that Google and Bing have anything to worry about in the short term from Blekko, but I think it's a search engine I will likely be using and it's a really interesting concept.

Blekko starts off from a point of having a curated list of websites, sort of like Yahoo! was famous for in the mid-90's.  Unlike Yahoo!, Blekko doesn't really put them into a categorized directory nor do they make descriptions for the sites.  Instead they index the sites, like any other search engine.  So in this basic form, Blekko searches a reviewed subset of the Internet, avoiding content farms and other undesirable sites.  This in itself is interesting, but it's not the most interesting thing about Blekko.

That comes in where Blekko takes a card from social networking and allows users to make they own custom tagged searches.  These tags are indicated by leading slashes, so Blekko uses as one of its advertising pitches "slash the web."  A user can create an account with Blekko and from sites that are in Blekko's database create a list of sites that are associated with one of these slash tags.  Then by adding that slash tag into a search, a user can search that set of sites.  These tags can be private or they can be public.

As an example I've created a Blekko slash tag of /ccs that consists of websites for all of the libraries in the CCS consortium to which Winnetka-Northfield Public Library District belongs, as well as the CCS consortium website itself.  Any user can type my username followed by CCS, "/herrmoody/ccs", as well as any other relevant terms into a Blekko search and get results that consist of pages from those websites.  Here's a sample search that looks for the word "kindle" in those websites.

This is an innovative development in the land of searching and I'm interested to see where it's going to go.